Two specific areas of cybersecurity — backups and identity and access management (IAM) — are responsible for nearly half (45%) of the cybersecurity industry's climate impact. Like any other technology, cybersecurity protections have costs to the environment, even though they are rarely discussed. Programs run on electricity.

Servers demand water. Devices are built from natural resources and eventually get thrown out. So far, what I have seen deployed are quite low-impact, low-usage tools." Related:OpenClaw's Gregarious Insecurities Make Safe Usage Difficult Cybersecurity categories that incur less of a carbon footprint include: application security; email security; network technologies like segmentation, mapping, and anti-distributed denial of service (DDoS) tools; and data protections — including protections for data in transit and at rest, including cryptography.

How to Make Cybersecurity Greener Without sacrificing cyber readiness, there are numerous ways for businesses to at least slightly lower their carbon footprints. The quickest policy change that organizations can make tomorrow, for example, is to refrain from automatically assigning dedicated workstations to outside contractors. CISOs can let contractors use their own machines, but still ensure their security by migrating to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Logs meanwhile are an area where there's often room to cut back.